


All Over but the Shouting

by SylvanWitch



Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Episode: s02e22 Ua Hopu (Caught), Episode: s03e20 Olelo Pa'a (The Promise), Episode: s03e22 Ho'opio (To Take Captive), First Time, Frottage, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Resolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-03
Updated: 2019-08-03
Packaged: 2020-07-30 08:43:40
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,924
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20094499
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SylvanWitch/pseuds/SylvanWitch
Summary: It begins with one crappy motel room bed and ends where one might expect.





	All Over but the Shouting

The room has only one double bed, not even a queen or a king but a standard, sway-backed double, conspicuously centered on the stained, brownish rug covering the uneven floor.

“We are _not_ sleeping in that bed,” Danny says, and it’s a credit to how long this fucking case has dragged on that Danny doesn’t consider any of the other ways in which that statement might be taken until he catches a startled expression fleeing from Steve’s face.

But it’s not Steve’s surprise that drives the breath out of Danny.

It’s the microsecond of want that follows it before Steve slams down the usual annoying smirk and all is once again right with their world.

Except it isn’t.

Because Danny saw it—saw Steve considering using the bed for something other than sleep—saw the look and echoed it with a tightening in his belly.

Danny has wanted Steve since the day Steve pointed a gun at him, defiant, hurt, and irritatingly beautiful.

But in the world of Danny Williams, beautiful people rarely want him for sex…at least not for keeps. 

“It’s disgusting,” Danny clarifies weakly, pretending to look out the window, which is inevitably reflecting Steve, who’s still standing near the foot of the bed working on what expression he should wear.

Next to Danny, the AC window unit wheezes into asthmatic life, a damp gust of tepid air spewing a billion mold spores into the room.

To distract himself from the fact that there’s no place in the room more than three steps from Steve and/or the bed, Danny stalks through the warped door and into the en suite.

The bathroom is a tragedy of rust stains and creeping mildew and there is a cockroach swimming lazily in the toilet bowl.

“I’m going to die of leprosy, and it’s going to be your fault,” he says, exiting before he can accidentally brush up against anything in there.

“Relax, Danny. Cooper’s supposed to be here at oh two hundred.”

Danny’s not sure which part of that to react to first—the fact that Steve has slipped into military lingo (a sure sign that he’s tired, too, as if the smudges under his eyes weren’t already a giveaway) or that he thinks Danny can relax when he’s waiting for a stone-cold, vicious killer in a ten-by-ten sweatbox occupied by a biohazard of a bed and his infuriatingly oblivious partner.

“That’s not comforting.”

Steve smirks and sits down on the side of the bed, facing the door, with the slow deliberation of someone yanking his partner’s chain.

Danny does his part by grimacing theatrically, though he is, in truth, _actually_ horrified, thinking of the myriad crimes they could solve if they had Fong process the biological samples they gathered from the bedspread.

Steve shakes his head. “I’ve ‘slept’ on worse.”

Steve’s inflection makes the air quotes unmistakable. And judging from the way Steve’s smirk has slipped into something a little suggestive, Danny knows that Steve knows that Danny knows.

His head hurts.

“Really?” Danny asks, exhaustion teaming up with natural exasperation to overwhelm his sense of self-preservation and stuff a sock in his things-not-to-say-to-your-partner filter. “You choose this flea-infested rat-trap to put the moves on?”

That takes care of the smirk, lewd or otherwise. The deer-in-headlights look is extremely gratifying, if fleeting, and Steve manages to wrestle outraged denial onto his face before three seconds have passed.

It’s too late for that, though, and by the telltale flutter of the pulse at Steve’s throat, Steve knows it.

“What’re you—?” he tries, and Danny says, “Forget it,” moving into Steve’s space until Steve has to spread his legs so Danny can get close enough to lean down and kiss him.

It might have been a fabulous kiss, but they’ll never know.

Outside, tires squeal on asphalt as someone wrenches his car into a parking spot; seconds later, a door slams definitively, and then there are footsteps in the room next door.

“Bingo,” Danny whispers, and Steve licks Danny’s breath off his own lower lip. His eyes are enormous, his face open, eyes wanting. Danny has to close his own eyes to keep from saying “Fuck it” and leaving Cooper to his homicidal devices long enough for Danny to finish what he was trying to start.

Steve clears his throat and puts his hands on Danny’s hips to move him back so Steve can stand.

His cargo pants frame the evidence of his desire, and Danny swallows a whimper.

Then a wave of cold certainty drowns his libido. Steve’s going to pretend this never happened. There’ll be a few days of awkward stop-and-start carguments as they try to resume their old rhythm, and then a case will give them something else to focus on, and they’ll go back to the delicate dance of denial they’d been two-stepping through for the last twelve months and change.

Sure enough, when Danny works up the courage to glance at Steve’s face again, his partner is wearing that grim, determined look he gets when he’s about to do something reckless and likely to get them both dead. 

“Let’s go,” Steve says, drawing his gun.

Danny goes.

*****

In retrospect, Danny should have recognized the signs of impending disaster.

On the surface, it seemed that Steve had thrown himself obsessively into the search for Wo Fat to the apparent exclusion of all other personal fixations.

But in the rare quiet moments when neither of them was snarking in the car or razzing each other over shrimp plates or umbrella drinks (to say nothing of the times when they were being shot at, blown up, or threatened with biological weapons), there was a hanging tension between them, like high power lines keening in warning of a coming storm.

Danny wrote it off to tiredness or stress or distress over a case gone wrong—god knew they had plenty in their work lives to be tense about—but some part of him, locked in a tiny cell in one corner of his over-active brain, was aware all the time of Steve’s proximity.

And that part knew that Steve was also aware.

Their mutual constructed ignorance could last only so long.

Danny just wishes it wasn’t Steve being hunted through the jungle with only his murderous arch-nemesis to watch his back that finally broke the artificial oblivion between them.

Sure, he’d wanted to be half-naked with Steve. He’d just have preferred not to be dabbing antiseptic onto his wounds while Steve held himself unnaturally still and tried to hide his wincing.

“This is not the way I wanted to get your shirt off,” Danny mutters, realizing only as it’s coming out that his inside words are on the outside.

Steve huffs a weary laugh that turns into a hiss as Danny touches a particularly nasty cut, and Danny freezes, afraid to see what expression Steve’s wearing: horror, discomfort, or—worst case scenario—the usual look he wears when they’re yanking each other’s chains.

Danny’s not expecting to see the slow, heated smirk that curls Steve’s battered lips up at one edge, and the unshuttered lust in his eyes is equally surprising.

He realizes two things simultaneously: One, Steve is listing slowly forward; and two, Danny’s got his free hand higher on Steve’s thigh than is strictly necessary.

Danny moves that hand to brace Steve on one of the few unbruised parts of his shoulder, holding him just those scant few inches away. Steve is close enough that Danny can feel the heat of his breath against his cheek and see even the minor indignities his face has been subject to.

“Danny,” Steve whispers, his whiskey-over-gravel voice spilling ice down Danny’s spine and making him shiver.

“Babe,” Danny says back, looking into Steve’s bloodshot eyes. “You’re in no condition to…” Ordinarily, this is where he’d let a gesture suffice when awkward words might otherwise be necessary, but Danny’s hands are busy keeping himself from doing something monumentally stupid.

Steve’s eyes slip closed, and Danny lacks the perspective of distance to know whether it’s exhaustion or disappointment pulling his mouth into a thin line.

Danny risks a kiss, then, just a chaste peck at the torn corner of Steve’s mouth, and watches, breath knocked out of him by the way Steve ghosts his tongue over his lips there, capturing some phantom taste of Danny.

“Later, when you’re up for it,” Danny promises, his words barely audible over the pounding of his heart.

Steve is asleep on the couch before Danny finishes his first aid.

*****

Danny could have predicted that “later” would turn out to be months.

What he wouldn’t have laid money on was Steve being the one to make a move. Danny had expected that if he was ever again foolish enough to let Steve see how much he wanted him, it would be when they were both moments away from certain death and any consequence of his foolishness would be very short-lived.

Here Steve is, though, reaching across the car, wrapping his big hand around the back of Danny’s neck, and hauling him none too gently across the center console for a searing kiss that leaves him panting and disoriented.

Steve whispers, “Need you,” against Danny’s lips, which he’s abandoned in favor of sucking kisses down his throat, and Danny is one hundred percent with the program Steve seems to have planned for them except for the part about Steve having disappeared with Catherine for several days and come home looking like someone had reached into his chest and yanked his heart out of his ribcage.

Danny knows Steve well enough to recognize the signs of heartache, and while he can’t be sure what’s caused it, he’s absolutely certain that he’s not going to be the guy Steve lays on a rebound bounce, so when Steve’s hand slides up Danny’s thigh and moves to cup the bulge in his pants, Danny grabs his wrist and squeezes hard enough to make his point clear.

“Danny?” Steve asks, his tone almost heartbreaking in its confusion.

Danny returns to his side of the car and spends a minute running football stats in his head to try to ease his heartrate down to something survivable. 

“Danny?” Steve asks again, this time in the flat affect he assumes when he’s forced to agree against his better judgment with the governor. It’s a tone that says he already knows he isn’t going to like what Danny’s going to say, and Danny swallows his nerves, knowing Steve’s right—he’s going to hate what Danny says next.

“What—” Danny starts, but he has to clear his throat because his voice breaks like he’s reliving the eighth grade. He refuses to look at Steve because he doesn’t want to have to smack Steve’s smug smirk off his face.

“What are we doing here, Steven?” he asks.

“We’re not doing anything at the moment, Danny,” Steve answers in that infuriatingly patient tone he sometimes takes, like Danny’s a child who needs things explained slowly and in small words.

“Don’t,” he barks, and then he moderates his volume but not his meaning. “Don’t patronize me. Please answer the question. Just answer the question, Steve.”

From the corner of his eye he sees Steve reach for the steering wheel and then hears the squeak of tortured leather as Steve wrings it with his hands.

Danny tells himself to grow up and stop thinking about how good those hands would feel all over him.

“Why do we have to complicate things?” Steve shoots back. “Why can’t it just be two friends giving each other comfort?”

That gets Danny’s attention, and he turns his head to take in Steve’s profile. His partner’s face is grey in the scant light coming through the windshield, his eyes invisible in the gloom, but Danny can see a muscle in his jaw ticking and the frantic flutter of the pulse at his throat.

His partner is feigning a calmness that he does not feel.

“What happened on your ‘mission,’ Steve?”

Danny is asking about Catherine, sure, but he has a feeling there’s more going on here than Steve being rejected by his sometimes squeeze.

Steve shakes his head, eyes staring implacably out into the darkness.

“Steve?” Danny prompts, making his tone gentle rather than demanding, “Please tell me what happened.”

“It’s—”

“And don’t say ‘it’s classified,’” Danny continues, firmly.

There’s a pause like held breath before a plunge, and then Steve’s head sags on his neck and he shakes it again, this time not in negation but in surrender.

“Come inside?” Steve asks softly, not waiting for Danny’s answer before climbing out of the car and moving—slowly, like an old man—toward the front door.

Danny follows a few paces behind, waits while Steve opens the door, checks the security system, and does a sweep of the perimeter upstairs and down.

He’s on the couch when Steve returns with two Longboards and sinks into the cushion beside him with a muffled groan, throwing his booted feet up on the table.

Danny looks over to see that Steve has tilted his head back over the top of the couch. His eyes are closed, and in the dim light from the single lamp, he can make out the deep shadows under Steve’s eyes and the tremor at the corner of his mouth, almost impossible to see if he weren’t sitting so close and didn’t know his partner so well.

Then, Steve begins to speak, telling his story to the ceiling and letting Danny listen in.

A few minutes into Steve’s account of the events surrounding Freddie Hart’s death and the awful indignities his body was subject to, Danny puts his hand on Steve’s leg, just above his knee, and leaves it there as an anchor, to offer the comfort Steve spoke of what feels like a million years ago.

Steve doesn’t acknowledge the touch. He holds himself rigid and apart, wearing a hundred-yard stare fixed on a scene thousands of miles away in a past that Danny didn’t share.

By the time he finishes speaking, his voice is hoarse. Danny pops the top off a Longboard and hands it to him wordlessly, watching Steve’s throat as he swallows half the bottle in a single pull.

Then he takes the bottle from Steve’s fingers and shifts closer to him on the couch. Steve leans forward, propping his forearms on his knees, head hanging, and Danny puts a hand between his shoulder blades, feeling that Steve’s earlier tremors have turned to a fine trembling, like the kind detected by seismographs from an earthquake deep beneath the waves and somewhere far off-shore.

He makes long, slow strokes down Steve’s back, the way he’d do with Grace after a bad dream, and slowly, slowly, Steve’s trembling eases until Danny thinks he might be half asleep.

Danny pats Steve gently on the back to get his attention and says, “C’mon, let’s get you to bed.”

It’s a measure of Steve’s extreme fatigue that Danny’s ambiguous phrasing gets nothing out of Steve except a truncated groan as he stands up and stretches.

Danny manfully ignores the way Steve’s shirt rides up, teasing him with a glimpse of Steve’s tight, tanned belly. He swallows a sound of his own and gives Steve a careful nudge to get him started toward the stairs.

At the bottom of the stairs, Steve balks. “I’ve got it from here, Danny. You should get home.”

A scornful, “Really?” is Danny’s only response, and a fleeting relief suffuses Steve’s expression before he seems to remember their usual playbook and tries on a half-assed leer.

“Save it,” Danny says, nudging Steve again, a little less carefully this time. “Go.”

Maybe Steve sees Danny’s resolve, or maybe he’s just too tired and heartsore to dredge up another protest. Whatever the case, he trudges up the stairs and lets Danny direct him to the bathroom to clean up and strip while Danny turns on the fan, opens the window, and turns down the bed to air it out.

When Steve emerges minutes later wearing a pair of sweatpants, hair damp at his temples and eyes haunted, Danny gestures to the bed, into which Steve climbs with a tight, blank expression that doesn’t bode well for his night’s rest.

Danny takes one look at the line of Steve’s mouth and the tightness in his jaw and sits down on the edge of the bed to take his shoes off.

“Danny?” Steve asks, bewilderment and hope warring in his voice, and it’s Danny’s turn to shake his head, not trusting his own voice right now.

He gets up and strips to his boxers, laying his clothes carefully on the chair in the corner and then rounding the end of the bed to climb in beside Steve.

“Go to sleep, babe,” Danny says, reaching across the cool span of mattress between them to let the back of his hand brush against the back of Steve’s.

A few minutes later, Danny watches the pain ease from Steve’s face as his breath evens out into sleep.

*****

They don’t get much sleep for a while then, and when they do, it’s broken by phone calls and nightmares.

By the time they return Ella Bishop to her family, hearts wrung tight and dry by the Morrises’ awful loss, everyone’s looking a little white around the eyes, shell-shocked and reeling.

For a change, Steve lets him drive, maybe sensing that Danny needs the distraction. His hands hurt where they grip the wheel, knuckles red and aching. It’s a good pain, though, and he nurses it, remembering the righteous fury and the immense, knee-weakening relief that followed.

The relief is short-lived.

He drops Steve off and returns to his apartment, which feels cramped and empty. Everywhere he looks, he sees Grace’s things, reminding him of what he could have lost with Peterson and what he could still lose in this son-of-a-bitching world.

Danny doesn’t have to imagine the terror of discovering his daughter has been taken nor the agony of knowing that she’s hurt and frightened and alone, and there’s nothing he can do to protect her. He’s been there, and his brain is broadcasting that film reel on repeat, complete with dry mouth and racing heart.

A knock at the door brings him out of his spiral, and Danny’s distracted enough that he forgets that he meant to order a pizza but never got around to it, so he’s got his wallet in hand when he opens the door to Steve, who’s holding a pizza, as it happens, and a six-pack of Longboards.

Steve says nothing, but one eloquent eyebrow goes up as he takes in the wallet and Danny’s momentary confusion.

“Shut up,” Danny says, preemptively, and Steve huffs a laugh and hands him the pizza.

They sit side by side on the couch eating from the box open on the coffee table. A game plays on the TV, though Danny has no idea who’s winning or even where it’s being played. He keeps seeing the Morrises’ faces as they lose their daughter all over again, and he feels a tightening in his throat that makes it hard to swallow.

He puts down a second slice half-eaten, and beside him, Steve says, “You can’t let it get to you like this,” which pisses Danny off.

“What the hell do you know about it?” Danny asks, his voice low and lethal. “You haven’t got a kid. You don’t know what it feels like.”

“I know that if you let every case with a kid get to you like this one did, you’re going to end up burnt out and angry all the time. Or you’ll eat your gun.”

“Right, because that’s what responsible fathers do when they have a bad day at work,” Danny shoots back. 

“All I’m saying is you need to put some distance between yourself and what you’re feeling right now.” Steve sounds so matter of fact, like it’s easy to separate his feelings from his work.

  
Danny knows his anger is out of proportion to what they’re arguing about, but he doesn’t care. He flexes his hands, feeling the abused skin tighten and strain, letting the pain work him up.

“Sure,” he growls. “I’ll just swallow my feelings, pretend I’m above it all, because that works so well for you, right? Tell me again, Steve, who’s waiting at home for you?”

The moment the words leave his mouth, Danny regrets them, and he turns toward Steve to take them back, except it’s too late, judging by the hurt Steve’s busy walling up behind a carefully blank expression.

King Kamehameha out front of the Palace has more life in him than Steve does when he stands up and steps around the coffee table, heading for the door.

Steve’s already halfway out it when Danny manages, “Wait!”

Steve freezes, head down, shoulders a rigid line of misery.

“Wait. Please?” Danny isn’t too proud to beg, not when he’s the one who’s fucked up, when he’s let his fear of losing Grace and his anger at the assholes who hurt little kids burn hotter than his love for the man who he’s just poked in a sore spot.

Steve turns but doesn’t close the door. He hovers on the threshold, one hand gripping the knob, one at his side curled into a half-fist.

Danny wishes Steve would hit him, would beat the living shit out of him, would put him out for a little while so his heart could stop trying to wreck itself against his ribcage.

“I’m sorry,” he says, and his voice sounds like someone else’s, thin and uncertain and a little breathless. Cold sweat breaks out along the back of his neck and down his spine; his tongue sticks to the back of his teeth, and he can feel his heart pounding in his throat so hard he has to swallow repeatedly to try to get the next words out.

“It’s not true,” he pleads. “You’re not alone.”

Steve’s eyes are on him, intense and searching, and Danny feels his heart kick and stutter in his chest. It’s fear of a different kind than the panic of a moment ago, and it fuels some desperate urge in him to close the distance between them.

Steve doesn’t flinch when Danny charges him, but he doesn’t close the door, either.

He doesn’t respond when Danny puts a hand on his shoulder for balance and presses his lips to Steve’s. Danny might as well be making out with a statue.

He pulls away only far enough to say, “Please,” and then kisses Steve again, putting everything he has into it. “Please,” he says again, “I’m sorry. You’re not alone. I love you.”

That gets a reaction.

Steve’s arm clamps around the small of Danny’s back, and he walks them both back into the room, kicking the door closed and deepening the kiss with a competence that makes Danny weak in the knees. His tongue is hot and confident in Danny’s mouth, and the motions Steve is making tighten a line from Danny’s tongue to his cock.

He moans, shameless, as Steve’s other arm comes around to pinion Danny against his hard chest. He can feel Steve’s cock pressing against his belly through the layers of their clothes, and he wants Steve naked right the hell now so he can see it for himself.

He must say some of that out loud because Steve finally comes up for air. Steve’s panting, reddened lips wet, eyes dark with wanting, but his hands are steady as he undoes his cargo pants and bends in half to untie his boots, strip off his socks, and kick the whole mess off. He strips his shirt off with the same casual efficiency.

Steve’s cock is a hard line in his briefs, and Danny is tempted to drop to his knees and get to work, but Steve snaps his fingers to force Danny’s eyes back up to his face.

“We can’t go back from this,” he says, and there’s obviously something seriously out of whack with the universe that it’s Steven J. McGarrett delivering the responsible adult lecture and Danny Williams struggling to find words beyond “Fuck me” and “Please” and “Right now.”

Danny swallows and nods, but Steve just crosses his arms, looking for all the world like he could wait all day and not like he’s got a damp spot on his briefs betraying how much he wants Danny.

“I don’t—” Danny starts, but he’s honestly not sure what he was going to say. He’s distracted by the pulse at Steve’s throat and by how he smells up close—remnants of soap from his morning shower, ocean air, sweat, pizza and beer—and by the almost irresistible desire to put his mouth around Steve’s Adam’s apple to feel it bob under his tongue.

“Danny, you gotta give me something here,” Steve says, and it’s gratifying as hell to hear how rough his voice is, how strained. He might look like he can wait until the world ends to get naked with Danny, but beneath the calm exterior, there’s turmoil.

“You really _want_ me,” Danny blurts, signals finally colliding in his lust-addled brain. Even to his own ears, he sounds stunned.

“Want,” Steve affirms, nodding like that’s an obvious bit of intel Danny should already have figured out for himself.

“Need,” he concedes, tongue darting nervously over his lower lip. He uncrosses his arms, opening himself.

“Love,” Steve he says finally, after a fraught pause. His eyes are steady on Danny’s face and his hands seem to move of their own accord, opening and closing at his sides, like he wants to reach for Danny but is waiting for a sign.

Danny takes a sharp breath, the sudden shift in his perspective dizzying. He licks his lips and watches Steve’s eyes track the motion. He feels Steve’s regard, his laser focus, like a touch, and his dick seems to grow harder, as if that’s even possible.

“I don’t want to go back to what we were,” Danny says, cobbling together his answer out of the few words his brain has managed to retain.

“Good,” Steve affirms, as though Danny’s just agreed to a mission brief and not completed a realignment of their entire relationship.

Danny’s never been more grateful for Steve’s military training. He strips Danny with a minimum of fuss, efficient, practical motions meant to get him naked as quickly as possible, except for his own briefs, which Steve leaves on.

  
There shouldn’t be anything sexy in Steve’s competence, but Danny finds himself a little short of breath, and the flush on Steve’s cheeks as he rakes Danny’s body with his eyes is enough to reassure him that Steve is anything but unaffected by the sight of Danny mostly naked.

Then, as if being almost naked is some profound barrier to the next level of intimacy, they stand there, inches apart, breathing hard and emphatically not touching.

A welter of emotions crosses Steve’s face, and Danny would marvel at how open his partner has suddenly become if it weren’t for the fact that his dick is so hard it’s aching.

With an impatient chuff of laughter, Danny slips off his own briefs and reaches for Steve’s.

Steve beats him to it, and Danny has only a few seconds to marvel at how beautiful Steve is, and then Steve’s taking control—of course—walking Danny backwards toward his bedroom, and Danny’s trying to grouse about it, but he can’t because Steve is touching his waist and the nape of his neck and kissing him, and he thinks he might fly apart.

Then the bed is at the back of Danny’s knees, and he’s being pushed gently but firmly onto it, Steve following him down, and oh, that’s… 

Steve is a big guy, heavy with muscle, a weight Danny feels as he’s pressed into the mattress from heels to head.

Ordinarily, Danny hates being reminded of his size relative to other men, and typically, he responds to such reminders with pointed examples of why underestimating him is foolish at best and terminally stupid at worst.

But right now, something about being surrounded by Steve—by the smell of his arousal, the faint tang of sweat, the shifting of his muscles as he settles between Danny’s spread legs—it’s doing something to him that Danny can’t explain, even to himself. He just knows he wants it to go on forever.

“Steve,” he gasps, hips thrusting up, seeking a sweat-slick stretch of skin, finding friction and slide both.

Steve makes a sound, a low grunt of surprised pleasure, and returns Danny’s frantic movements thrust for thrust.

  
There’s nothing smooth or coordinated about it, but it’s glorious, and the little noises Steve makes, the exhaled breaths and exclamations, wind Danny up until he thinks he might come just from hearing Steve breaking his name in half as he chases his own climax.

Danny comes first, a white-out, clenched-jaw freight train of an orgasm, tearing noises out of him that Steve answers with a shout of his own as he goes rigid and adds to the hot mess on Danny’s belly.

Danny’s ears are full of thunder, and he thinks his heart might tear its way out of his chest. Lightning shoots across the black behind his closed eyelids. He’s damp with sweat, covered in spooge—and Steve—and having some kind of cardiac event, and he’s never been happier.

He manages to coordinate his muscles enough to open his eyes and let go of Steve’s biceps, which have little white moons where he’d been holding on.

He touches the scar on Steve’s chest and risks a look up into Steve’s eyes, which are bright with love and joy.

Then a bead of sweat drips from Steve’s forehead to Danny’s nose, and he says, “Ugh, babe,” wiping it away with a grimace.

Steve smirks and pushes himself up and over to flop beside Danny, only their arms touching, but even that is too much, Steve’s skin radiating heat like a furnace.

“You’re hot,” Danny complains, and Steve answers, “Thank you,” in what Danny realizes must be his post-coital growl. Jesus, it’s worth the mess on his stomach to hear it.

“Not what I meant,” Danny shoots back, but there’s a fondness in it, and, too, he’s still catching his breath, so it’s not very convincing as protesting goes.

With impressive muscle control, Steve sits up and swings his feet off the bed, padding to the bathroom and returning moments later with a cool, damp washcloth, which he uses to wipe Danny’s belly clean.

Then he leans over and kisses Danny.

It feels like something they’ve done a hundred times already—the teasing, the care, even the intimacy. Maybe they’ve never come all over each other before, but to Danny, it feels like that’s just an oversight, like everything they’ve been and done before now has led naturally to this.

“Stop it,” Steve says, looking down at Danny from where he’s sitting on the mattress next to Danny’s hip.

“What?” 

“Don’t overthink it, Danny,” Steve says, but he’s smiling like he already knows what Danny’s going to say.

“Have you met me?” Danny answers, following the script.

Steve shrugs, still smiling. “I love you. You love me. That’s all we really need to know, right?”

Danny starts to open his mouth to correct Steve’s wildly optimistic assumptions, and then it strikes him that he’s laying naked next to the man he loves, and maybe things are that simple after all. Maybe, this time, love will be enough.

“You might be right, babe,” Danny answers just as uncertainty begins to wipe the relaxed smile from Steve’s face. Then he reaches up and pulls Steve down for a lingering kiss, letting the feel of his mouth, the smell of him, his size and weight and strength draw him out of his head.

*****

“I swear to god, Steve, if you’re taking me to some flea-trap, I am never letting you plan a date for us again.”

Steve says, “Don’t you trust me? Danny, I’m hurt,” but since he’s also smiling the way he does when he’s about to do something monumentally reckless, Danny knows that Steve doesn’t really mean it.

Danny does trust Steve—had trusted him first with his life, then with his daughter’s life, and finally with his heart and soul and body and everything that made up Danny Williams, Jersey transplant and inveterate pineapple hater.

But the motel they’re rolling up to is ominously familiar, and Danny can’t help shuddering as he recalls the sway-backed mattress, filthy carpet, and vermin-infested bathroom.

“You can’t be serious,” he says, his protest made weak by actual disbelief.

Steve shoots him a look that says _Trust me_ as clearly as any words and parks the car in front of Room 12, its teal paint peeling, a ring of grease around the doorknob attesting to its frequent use.

Danny shakes his head but gets out, sparing only the barest of glances at the spot on the cement next door where Emmett Cooper had ended his short and vicious life.

Mostly, he has eyes for Steve’s back, the broad shoulders that block Danny’s view of Room 12 and the admittedly spectacular ass it’s been Danny’s pleasure to regularly tap.

So, it’s a surprise—as it was no doubt intended to be—when Steve flips on the light and steps out of the way, revealing a room transformed.

Steve’s watching Danny’s face with a mix of pride and uncertainty that is so rare as to be totally adorable, and Danny gives him what he’s waiting for almost immediately.

“Babe,” he says, spreading his hands to indicate the whole of the room, which has been altered from a biological disaster of a hot-sheet dump to an inoffensive mid-level chain hotel room by virtue of new bedding—including a duvet with the tag still on it—an indoor-outdoor rug, cheap wall art, and a deep, deep cleaning. 

“This is…” 

For a guy who talks as much as Danny does, he’s at a total loss for words, which Steve seems to take in the spirit in which it’s intended.

The bathroom door is still a warped mess, though, and the “Out of Order” sign indicates the limits of even Steve’s always-prepared stick-to-it-ive-ness. 

When he sees Danny looking at it with a question mark, Steve has the grace to look sheepish. “I’ve got wet wipes, a couple of gallons of water, and a camp toilet in the back of the truck.”

Danny wants to tell Steve how much it means to him that he went to all this trouble—not to mention expense—to recreate their first almost-kiss, that moment on the long-ago stakeout when he first realized that the desire he felt was returned by Steve.

He wants to say something sweet and loving and sexy, but he seems to have something in his throat, and he’s pretty sure it’s his heart.

Steve’s smile turns a little thin, and Danny waves his hands, trying to indicate the sudden failure of his vocabulary. 

Then, in the finest tradition of Steve himself, Danny abandons the effort of speaking and gets right down to action, instead, closing the door behind him and the space between them in a heartbeat and then letting his lips and his hands do the talking for him.

Unlike their first visit to the motel, this one doesn’t end in bloodshed (though there is a little shouting).


End file.
